Five Things I Learned While Being Neurodivergent At Work 

Technically speaking, I have always been neurodivergent at work – but it was only in 2020, 4 years into my working life, eating and sleeping and working and living entirely within the four walls of a small bedsit flat and losing my marbles exactly as fast as that description implies, that I was diagnosed. I ticked almost everydiagnostic box for ADHD Combined Type … and almost all the reasons why I was never diagnosed before that humid afternoon, either. 

My diagnosis reframed my entire life, and that included my working life too. 

Here are the best bits. 
 
1) Communication goes both ways 

The first rule of communication is that everyone does it differently – and that it works best when all parties make an effort. Communication is one of the areas where my ADHD causes the most issues, especially at work. But, armed with greater self-awareness, I feel more empowered to improve; at my most recent PDR, my manager signposted me to professional training to help me build a framework for managing my communication style in different settings, and help me learn to listen as well as, I know, I can talk. 

2) Structure makes a work day work 

As Bo Burnham once sang, ‘apathy’s a tragedy, and boredom is a crime’; I need a variety of tasks to do every day, to keep me stimulated and engaged, and to ensure I always have something else to do when I am waiting for responses or deadlines before I can make any further progress. As I cannot psychically sync myself with all the different people my work connects me to, I’ve learned to make use of tools to help me keep track of my multiple projects – and so I can send follow-ups in a reasonable timeframe, rather than losing track of days and worrying I’ve lost the plot.  
 
I live and work by my Outlook calendar (for meetings, deadlines, and allocating tasks to specific parts of the working day), Trello task tracker (for updating progress on long-term projects, and allowing team members to know what I’m working on at a given time), and a beleaguered, be-sticker’d Moleskine notebook which is full of meeting notes, to do lists, action points and neon post-it notes to ensure critical information doesn’t get lost in the colour-coded shuffle.  

3) Play to my strengths – and share them! 

I love spreadsheets with clearly named tabs and colour-coded rows, so everyone in a project can see what needs doing and whose job it is. I love Teams chats with important information pinned to the top, so it’s easy for everyone to find. I love indulging my inner commissar and purging an inbox of years-old emails that no one needs any more, and making sure important information is stored safely in a subfolder where everyone can find it, saving the world from the mercies of the deeply inaccurate Inbox Search function one right-click at a time. 

Other people love these things too – but it’s not always viable for them to do it. Volunteering myself to undertake work that I already find easy and enjoyable for the betterment of the team makes everyone happy, and builds positive exchanges where I can ask for support on tasks I find the opposite, like complex data tasks, or coming within a nautical league of anything done on T1. 

4) Roll with the punches 

Executive dysfunction is one of the most visible, and mentally and emotionally exhausting, aspects of an ADHD brain. Some days, no matter how urgent or simple or important or exciting, a task is simply not going to be doable, and there is nothing I can do about it. 

Not that I haven’t tried – but there’s only so many times one can re-live Waterloo before they know the end result is going to be the same, catchy ABBA song and all. 

Instead of spending the day in a frustration spiral, nursing the bruise, I’ve learned to roll with the punches; adjusting or restructuring a task to avoid the aspects causing a shutdown, finding ways to delegate with my team, and on the worst days, simply moving the task to another time and focussing on something else until I can return to the initial matter. It doesn’t solve all issues, and it’s still frustrating, but it helps mitigate the mental toll, and ensures I can still meet critical project deadlines. 

5) Environment matters 

Hybrid working might be the best thing to ever happen to my ADHD. There are struggles to be found in both home and office environments, but a blend of both can be a perfect tonic. 

To this end, I tend toidentify certain tasks as ‘office jobs’,typically ones where multiple monitors, swift access to colleagues, and a built-in connection to the university intranet are helpful. And, likewise, other tasks are ‘home jobs’, where silence, solitude, and getting up from my desk to pace and verbally unpack an issue to a rubber duck dressed like Gandalf the Grey are a vital part of the process. 

With this method, I can make the most of the resources each task needs, and balance the priorities on my plate each day; I find I usually need more to do on a day in the office to keep me stimulated, and knowing where and how I like to work lets me keep myself and my team more accurately updated on when I’m likely to have results, or updates, to share. 

I’m very lucky to have a job where my colleagues are supportive, my tasks are varied, and I have a lot of independence. This way of working suits me as a person, including but also beyond my ADHD; this matters to my day to day work, but also how I think about progression and development. Finding a job that’s a good fit is a challenge for anyone, and managing a brain that doesn’t run on the usual software adds an additional layer of complexity … but it comes with a clarity, too, that neurotypical people can find harder to reach. 

If, I suppose, you only wanted one key takeaway from this list, let it be this; the person who best knows your brain, and your job, is you. Take some time re-introducing the two to one another. You’ll have lessons of your own to learn – and your working life (and maybe even beyond!) will be better for it.